


Let Him Never Leave

by angelinthecity



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman, Find Me - André Aciman
Genre: Elio's POV, Fantasizing, Flash Forward, Happy Ending, Longing, Love, M/M, Memories, Missing Scene, Reunions, Roma | Rome, Romantic Fluff, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-01-31 17:54:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21450313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelinthecity/pseuds/angelinthecity
Summary: Oliver returns to the house in Italy twenty summers later and once again, it leads to Elio’s life steering a new course.“Elio, do you really not know?” he asks.And that's when it starts to dawn on me. There’s a reason why he looks like he is of this landscape, why he remembers every berm and belfry, why he now smiles at me and why, even beyond the smile, his eyes brim with hope, promise, and invitation.Inspired by everything in the last chapter ofFind Me.[COMPLETED Jan 19, 2020]
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 414
Kudos: 384





	1. Reprise

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set during/after the last pages of _Call Me by Your Name_ and the last chapter of _Find Me_. The sequel made me dream of things that could have happened between and outside of the scenes described in the books.
> 
> There will be spoilers/references to some events of _Find Me_ in this story (just a heads-up for those who haven't read it yet).

It’s about to start again, all of it.

His palm curved according to the shape of my cheek, his mind reading my thoughts as if they’re his own.

A reprise, a return to the original theme.

That any of it feels like a surprise is a surprise in itself, because our day up until now has already been a cornucopia of nostalgia. Since he arrived this morning and got out of the car almost in the exact same spot as on the day when it all began for the first time, we have done everything to revisit his memories of the place that he calls a paradise at noon.

His things were taken to his old room and I took him for a tour through the house where the walls still stood where they always had, to the garden where we had worked and laid in the sun, and finally up to the balcony where he was contented to see the view to the bay and find it still crystal blue twenty years later.

“Everything—still the same,” he said and looked so happy that I didn’t have the heart to remind him: _everything but._

Besides, he was right, about a lot of it. When I suggested a bike ride to him, the words rang true and comforting in my ears like I had said them a thousand times before, even if only a handful of them had been in real life and the rest in my dreams.

He took up on the offer, and our ride to town was steeped in familiarity. He still knew to anticipate the sudden bends of the road, to swerve to avoid the bumps, and despite our speed not being quite what it used to be, he and his long legs and strong thighs still overtook me easily on the uphills.

Even when we reached town, our long lunch where he sat relaxed, wiped his mouth after taking a sip from his beer and asked how my days went by these days, echoed our first morning together at the piazza.

Back then, that morning, I had been curious about him, curious about my own strange interest in him, curious to watch the Star of David hanging around his neck disappear under his shirt when he would confidently take another swig of his drink.

Now seventeen had been replaced by thirty-seven and twenty-four by forty-four, but he still seemed to know everything: how to compliment the waitress, where to go for a pack of cigarettes when the mood struck him, and how to make me feel alive with one nudge of an elbow when it was time to leave.

His delight in finding most things in town unchanged was almost child-like, but it grew into a peacefulness as our day went on. He was happy here. His every cell radiated deep contentment, the lines on his forehead smooth and his gaze halcyon.

Our nostalgia tour continued and I took him to the belfry in San Giacomo, because when I tried to think of other places and suggested the empty, scorched lot, he claimed he had ‘been there, done that’.

When we climbed the staircase to the tower, he went ahead, eagerly leaping over two stairs at a time and I followed him upwards and upwards, spiraling towards the sky until we reached the top. I watched him take in the view. He leaned forward, barely breathless from the climb, palms steadying him on the ledge of the opening. After the bike ride in the sun and the hike to the top, his cerulean shirt was spotted cobalt with sweat between his shoulder blades, and I found myself wanting to find out whether it still smelled the same. I could have snuck behind him, pretend I was trying to get a glimpse of the seascape over his shoulder.

“Beautiful,” he concluded after his inspection of the bay and the town below us, and I agreed even though my eyes hadn’t left him for a moment.

We returned to the house in time for an afternoon nap. He thanked me for the tour, polite, stretched his long arms and without a care in the world, retired to the room we had given to him and his luggage.

I went to my parents’ old bedroom that was nowadays in my use. I lay there on top of the bedspread, alone in the middle of the bed meant for two, and didn’t sleep at all.

Before dinner, we sat in the living room with my mother. She had tried to help Mafalda with the cooking, but had had trouble keeping in mind what we were supposed to have. I was used to that, but for him the change in her was painful to see.

Still, when he had brought her his present, she had at least recognized him. Not immediately, not from his looks, but from his voice.

“It’s me. And I come bearing gifts.”

“Ollliver,” she had said in her low voice, relieved to recognize the stranger to be a loved one and softly emphasizing the first consonant of his name as she always had.

She hadn’t asked for the reason for his visit, and neither had I.

For her, it didn’t matter as these days everything was either a delightful surprise or a confusing conundrum to her, depending on what kind of a day she was having. By sheer luck or divine intervention, his visit had fallen into the former category.

My reason for not asking him had been different.

He had not elaborated, when he had written to ask if he could come to B. on his way from Rome. He had talked about himself in the first person, so I had assumed that it would not be with his family, but beyond that, I was not sure if his plan to stay overnight was set in stone or whether he could be persuaded to spend a few more days.

If I was honest, it didn’t matter. I would take what I could get. The truth was that one day of Oliver was better than a lifetime of anyone else.

Yet, the wondering about his reasons had trickled into my thoughts from time to time during the day. Had he been in Rome in business? We had not spoken in years before his email, so was this merely a belated courtesy call after my father’s death? Or was he on vacation, his family occupied with other engagements thus leaving him to travel alone?

But if I thought about it more closely, he had seemed settled all day long. He hadn’t behaved like he needed to soak up all the fun of a vacation before it's over, but rather like a man inspecting his new house on a moving day, taking a tour of the premises between the stacks of cardboard boxes when the long process was safely in the final stretch. There was a decided calm in his moves when he sat next to my mother at our dinner table, or later in the evening when he pours limoncellos for himself and me after everyone else has retired to their rooms, Little Ollie having fallen asleep already during the film we all had watched together.

We decide to take our limoncellos to the garden. We go outside with our small, mismatched glasses half-full and settle at our old breakfast table that now stands under the trees. He chooses the seat he used to sit in every morning twenty summers ago, and I sit down across from him, at what used to be my father's spot at the table.

I watch him take a sip from his drink, I haven't even touched mine.

He looks the same, and I can’t help it: I still want him the same.

He probably knows it, by the talk we had when I visited him at his university five years ago. But we haven’t touched each other all day, save for the occasional graze of our fingers when I handed him my father’s old bike for loan or the sweep of our shoulders in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. I believe he avoids it because he knows I would jump on any chance to have him hold me, and he doesn’t want to disappoint me by having to stop things there and thus make the rest of his stay awkward between us. _This is nice, Elio, let’s just keep it like this._

Being with him in New Hampshire was different from having him here in our original scene of falling into the things that imprinted both of us for years after. Being in that mahogany-paneled hotel bar with him was necessary, for I had things I needed to tell him, but our words and feelings were strangers that didn’t belong there. Not like our way to be with each other belongs in this garden.

His relaxed sigh, the approving sound after his swallow of his limoncello, it all belongs here, in this view, and taking him out of it would be to cut an Oliver-shaped hole into a painting. After, there would be nothing but an empty spot in the canvas, because the swirls and strokes of the paint have already set and it’s too late to spread any of the colors to fill in the missing spot.

When he leaves tomorrow, I will have to once again rearrange the furniture of my life to cover the empty region in the painting, to drag a grandfather clock in front of it to keep it from my vision so that I’m able to go on with my days. Each time I have seen him has required a fix afterwards: something to make me stop remembering how he had wanted, but refused to, sleep with me on his Christmas break; something else to distract me from the memory of how close to me he sat in that bar booth. Tomorrow, I will need yet another thing to forget how he looks in the garden of this house that has seen us come together and become distant and now witnesses us in this strange in-between that I’m too afraid to poke.

He notices me examining him and does the leaning-back in his chair that tells me that he knows I'm looking and that he wants me to look.

“Thinking of how to get me to fetch us refills?” he asks and grins. We have left the bottle inside.

I shake my head. _No. _

But my not telling him what it is that I’m thinking about instead, makes him stop teasing and he grows serious. His blue eyes are greyer nowadays and they examine me as closely as mine have done to his face, his arms, his shape.

I have to get up, to have something to do, because I can't bear to see him looking at me like that without blurting out everything that I had left unsaid in New Hampshire, so I go and make it look important that I have to move Little Ollie's bike away from the middle of the garden path. I take my time to secure the child’s bike to lean against the big tree, in the spot where we keep it.

I want to tell Oliver that I don't want him to go.

I don’t want him to go, because the picture of my life will never be whole without him and there have been so many years of it being unfinished and I don't want it to become a Sagrada Familia that never reaches completion.

After I let go of the bike, I glance at him again. I try at a smile, but it's a sad effort.

His eyes are still serious, and I read the question in them before the words come out.

“Elio, do you really not know?” he asks.

And that's when it starts to dawn on me. There’s a reason why he looks like he is of this landscape, why he remembers every berm and belfry, why he now smiles at me and why, even beyond the smile, his eyes brim with hope, promise, and invitation.

“You belong here,” I say slowly, waiting for him to refute it, giving him a chance to stop me before I make a fool of myself by hoping too much, but he doesn't take it. Instead, he looks more certain than he ever has.

“I do.”

He watches the news make its way through my body and lets out a fond laugh, closing his eyes for a moment and shaking his head as if he can’t believe he had to tell me.

_Silly Elio, I have already been yours all day and you didn’t know._

When he looks at me again, I haven’t turned my gaze away and I will never want to. Thus, it follows him as he pushes his chair back, gets up, arranges the chair back to its place close to the table, and then starts walking, both of us knowing that these steps will be the last ones of the long journey he has taken to find not only me, but himself, again.

When he gets to where I stand, he grazes the side of my face with his fingertips, then lets his palm rest on my cheek.

“But not there,” he nods towards the table that he sat at a moment ago. “Here.”

His eyes look into mine and the distance of late summer air between us gets shorter and shorter until his lips touch the corner of my mouth and stop there, because I haven’t yet opened mine, and his will have to wait because once mine part, it’s all over, all of my years of ardent training to live without him will vanish like they never happened, and he will be me again and I will be him and there will be no turning back for as long as we both shall live. I think of the moment on the berm where our first kiss happened and this will be a new first kiss, new because we are new even if our souls aren’t, and his face is so close that the sunspots on his skin are out of focus, but then I close my eyes and open my lips and he's here.

He kisses me as if my mouth had been lost and Saint Phanourios has revealed it to him.

He kisses me and leans into me with such force that I stumble in my steps, and my back hits the trunk of the tree that I used to climb on when I was too young to even know that an Oliver existed, and his body presses against my front to remind me that he does. He cups my face with both of his hands and lets his gaze travel all over my kissed face and then I can't take it anymore, and I hurl my arms around his neck and myself against him, my nose buried behind his ear and my lips wet on his neck.

He only says it the next morning when I do it again, but he could have said it right then and there, with a mixture of truth and relief. _I haven't been kissed like that in so long._

I bring my lips from his neck to his ear and ask: “Shall we go and move your bags,” and he knows what I mean because he always does and always will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. I wanted to post this first chapter for Elio’s canonical birthday <3, but more will follow.
> 
> As my aim was to spin this story around the nooks and crannies of the canon events, a couple of Oliver’s lines of dialogue ('been there, done that' / 'I haven't been kissed like that in so long') in this chapter have been borrowed from the original books.


	2. Angles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _This is it, my posture says. Still think your trip was worth it?_

It’s always been there, we never parted, and the rush of novelty belongs to those who are new and in need of finding out who the other person is in all occasions; in conversation, in tenderness, in moments of passionate abandon.

I already know who Oliver is.

After we have retrieved his bags and carried them to my bedroom through the quiet house, we look at the bed that has felt too big for me alone, and then at each other.

We both know what’s about to happen, and there have been many times of us going to bed together, but this is not the same room and his moves are tentative. His eyes take in the space: the faded Persian rug worn thin from years of footsteps, the zigzag pattern of the wooden floors, the bed that is a real bed with ornate sage bedposts instead of two twins temporarily pushed together. He looks at everything but no longer at me.

He turns to close the door and I turn off the light, no longer as confident.

I fold my shirt onto the ottoman at the foot of the bed and wait for him to catch up, but he won’t. He remembers that I like to be naked first.

I had been barefoot to begin with, so there’s not much left to take off. I step out of my shorts, and they and then my underwear both follow my shirt.

When he turns around, I make him look.

_This is it, _my posture says. _Still think your trip was worth it?_

He sees the uncertainty that I’ve caught from him and his eyes soften. _You goose. That’s not what I have been nervous about. _

I shrug and contort my shoulders, flitting between braving his gaze and hiding from it. My heart speeds up but I make myself ask: “What is it, then?”

One step towards me, then another, and he confesses about the two lost—or maybe saved—decades between the last time and today as his hand reaches behind me lightly, then firmer and finds my shoulder blade. His shirt is soft against my chest, and the graze of his nose down my neck, below my ear, along my shoulder, would make me impatient if I didn’t know what he was doing.

I sigh, pleased, when he whispers: “You still smell the same.”

I recognize his smell, too. Unlike a beloved image or a sound, it’s hard to conjure a smell that you’ve forgotten, but when it’s there again, everything associated with it comes flooding back. His brings back a cloud of warm, still afternoons and a flurry of intoxicating nights. He didn’t wear cologne back then but does now. I have caught hints of it during the day, but this late at night it’s mostly worn off, and it’s his skin and breath that envelop me and transport me to years gone by that are miraculously at my reach again.

He leans down to kiss my chest, but his lips barely brush my skin before he says that I need to lie down. I try to pull him on the bed with me, but he resists.

“Not yet.”

He stands at the foot of the bed, with that look in his eyes that once used to make me hard in an instant. The one that lets me read his mind and if I look long enough, I can see his entire path of desire.

I shuffle further up on the bed on my elbows, hoping to draw him in with me but he takes hold of my ankle, thumb sweeping over the jutting bone on the inside, and I try to tell him my feet are dirty from the damp lawn and gravel in the garden, but he only brushes off the tufts of grass and kisses the soles all the same, solemn and eyes fully on me, before placing my foot back on the bed.

When the old mattress finally dips under his weight, I feel us starting again mere dozens of feet away from where my body first fell under his spell. I squeeze my eyes shut when his lips make their way to my mouth and I know that he will kiss my closed eyelids, too.

There is recognition in all of it, in his pulling off his shirt, in the way I hold on to his weight like it’s the anchor of my life that has stayed put, waiting for me to return to the boat from my jaunt to the shore so that we can start sailing again.

The trepidation is new.

The fumbling of my limbs as if they don’t know where or how to belong; his hesitation to fully let go. Patches of our skin are in constant contact, fingertips finding old and new places, but something is missing.

“What is holding us back?” he murmurs after a while and this insecurity in him that I have never seen before spreads to me, too. Has time played its hand? Did we dream of this, asleep and awake, only to find out that we remembered it all wrong? Are our bodies that once fit so well together now only angles and missteps?

We try, but the best we can do is hug each other. He blames the jet lag that still plagues him; I fetch us extra pillows to make us more comfortable when I ask him to just hold me and talk to me.

We sit up, arrange the pillows against the headboard of the bed and he gathers me in his arms. We look at each other’s faces, his oscillating between tenderness and heartache, and I press my nose on his cheek in comfort. My lips persuade his to part, and I kiss him full of reassurance that this is enough. While the cells under these sheets have gone through more cycles of division than when they were last together, they are still of the same origin and we can give each other this one night, or however many we will need.

As the nocturnal air floods into the silent house through the open window, he tells me how he always heard me talk to him and how the beckoning finally got unbearable. His voice carries through the air and his heartbeats through his skin as my head rests on his chest. The angles of earlier are gradually softening, my calf molding around the curve of his shin, my fingers fitting into the dips that I find between his ribs. As he talks, he makes expeditions in my hair, softly scratching my scalp, fingers testing how long the strands of my hair are these days.

His thumb strokes over my cheek bone, chin, when he tells me he had to return because it was the only choice. I think of another night when I was in his arms and there had been no other choice for him than to get on a plane the next day, and so I watch the treetops and the night sky instead of him when I quietly ask: “And tomorrow?”

“I’m not going to leave.” He makes me look at him and says it again: “I’m not going to leave.”

I search his face for a sign that this is an elaborate and cruel joke, studiously set up via emails and the day's tour of memories and the kiss in the garden; that I will wake up from a hallucination any moment now; that I have lost my comprehension of words and what he actually said was something completely different.

None of these turn out to be true, and instead, he rolls us over. My head sinks into the pillows and he hovers over me as he takes a good look at my face.

“Ever,” he says and kisses the word onto my mouth and into my being until I am breathless.

He returns to his side of the bed, equally without breath, and I follow, draping my limbs around him.

He tells me he has kept a vigil every year on my birthday, taking time from his seemingly real but ultimately phantom life, in order to imagine ours.

This overwhelms me, and I need to burrow deeper into him to make sure I’m not dreaming all of this, because I sometimes have. The emptiness I have woken up to after those nights has almost been worse than him leaving the first time, so I now feel the stubble peeking out on his jaw, press my nose on his skin and breathe him in, taste yet another patch of softness on his lip to make sure this is reality for all my senses.

I tell him that I want to hear all about those days, what he did, what he thought about, but that it needs to be later, because this night and these truths are making me dizzy.

“Later,” he repeats and hums amused, still remembering the phrase he once used for escaping from his feelings. I use it for the same purpose now, but it’s not an indefinite later and my skin doesn’t leave his.

I tell him of the vigils of my own, on the streets of the ancient and eternal city, of the particular one at the wall that means nothing to anyone but everything to me.

He’s moved but not surprised. “Sounds like you,” he says.

“You remember the spot?”

“I remember the spot.”

I tell him that we have to go back there one day, soon. “I want to show the spot the you that you are now.”

“Is there a difference?”

I look up at him and smile. He looks remarkably as he always did, he still has all of his hair and there is not a pouch of fat in sight, but it’s irrevocable that we’ve changed. Not our souls in relation to one another, the souls that were lying in wait for them to find each other again when the time was right, but my reckless immersion in passion at seventeen can’t compare to the vastness of what I feel for him now that the years have shown how rare and singular what we have between us is. If there is any difference between yesterday and today, it only makes the scales tip heavily in today’s favor.

“Is there one for you?”

My turning the question on him leads him to the same conclusion I had already arrived at before him, and his voice breaks when he fiercely holds my head against him and says quietly: “I can’t believe that we–“

I can’t either.

Certainly, I had entertained the idea of how one day he would come back, or write, or call, just to say he had lived the wrong life. But those thoughts had flourished only in moments when I had felt melancholic, perhaps after having seen a particular painting or after hearing a certain piece of music that reminded me of him. And so when he had tried to ask for forgiveness when we met in New Hampshire, I would have none of it. There was nothing to forgive.

To me at least, as I didn’t hold anything against him.

Maybe he did himself, and remembering that as I lie in his arms, no longer having to imagine, I finally realize that that is what he has been asking me to grant him all along: an absolution for the choices that he had made against himself and which had led him to live a parallel life that had been a faint imitation of what we could have been.

And so I break free from the hold of his hands to hold his face in both of mine, and I tell him that I forgive him.

The words aren’t born in me, my mind has never conjured them or needed me to say them, but I do it because I am him and he is me and he receives, from himself, the forgiveness that he has needed and he is finally free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. More in a couple of weeks again.


	3. Sunrise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Everything is warm, the cocoon of the duvet, his face against mine, his hand at the back of my neck, his tongue in my mouth._

I wake up to a feeling of someone touching my chin. My pillow is damp with nightly drool and Oliver’s thumb sweeps its slick remains from the corner of my mouth before he kisses me.

“You’re up.”

My voice is hoarse but his moves are agile as if he’s been up for hours by now. Did he have trouble sleeping? Or was he just watching me sleep? The thoughts dash by, the latter leaving warmth in its wake before my mouth opens for him and more kisses follow.

I yield to him and everything is warm, the cocoon of the duvet, his face against mine, his hand at the back of my neck, his tongue in my mouth, my heart. Each kiss awakens me further and I move closer to him, to search for the source of the heat, because the early mornings are starting to show signs of fall and my skin wants to absorb the warmth from his. I push the folds of the duvet out of the way so that there’s nothing between us, and when I shuffle to press flush against him, we both come to a stop.

The complications from a few hours earlier have evaporated over the dark of the night, gone with the moon that has been replaced by the rising sun, and I feel him heavy and hard against my thigh. He must know that I do, because he smiles, and I ask, my desire already catching up after meeting its old friend: “Is that for me?”

The dawn has dropped its surprise in our laps, and the relief that we didn’t have to wait longer than this turns quickly into dripping want. He moves a little, and then I move and touch him the way no one but he likes to be touched, and there’s joy when we realize that all of it still works.

Through the melody of his laughter, he urges: “Do that again.”

I oblige and let my hand find him, all of him, and my palm remembers. My thumb remembers and he swells, becoming even harder, even heavier, until his breath catches and it’s like it used to be.

It would be hypocritical to claim I hadn’t enjoyed doing this to others, but my mind skips over all those other times, right back to the first time Oliver let me touch him like this. Not the time at the berm, which was a desperate, botched attempt, but the time when he had already given in and surrendered, surrendered to the fact that his body got excited by mine and there was nothing to be done to stop it.

Our eyes never leave each other and the look in his makes the ripples of desire rush over me. The covers are off and the cool air of the room embraces us as he raises his arms above his head like an animal revealing its belly, trusting that it won’t be hurt, and I want to climb on top of him, my limbs enclosing him on the bed on every side. I kiss the underside of his forearm, press my face into his warm armpit. Crouching close to him, I kiss him on top of the warm pulse on his neck and then all over and he smiles, relishes my enthusiasm, my gasps, his own. I lick his arm, let the skin fold up between my teeth and he curses for the first time since he arrived in B.

I have lived lives with others in the in-between years, but all of this is coming from a reserve marked ‘Oliver’ and when I tell him I have saved everything for him, he pulls my face to his and the kisses don’t stop until he has me gasping for breath.

He hasn’t been with a man in twenty years, but deftly, he pushes me onto my back and crowds me between the sheets and him and his lips are on my neck, on my throat, then on my lips again.

Fortune, that’s what this is. I had always thought we would one day happen to each other again, maybe on a quiet street in uptown Manhattan if I was realistic, or outside a concert hall in Berlin if I was bold, and we would have succumbed to each other for a moment had we both felt weak enough or strong enough. Yet, I hadn’t dared to think it would be like this. As his body takes its turn in enthralling mine, I think of the fortune of it all, of having him push his hand under the arch of my waist to gently encourage me to lift my hips, the fortune of knowing this leads to a forever and not to yet another goodbye.

I want my body to be at his disposal but he makes sure he finds all my spots, too: one after the other, a trail of memories acting as his breadcrumbs leading the way and I want to both hurry him up and tell him to spend eternity at every sweet bend. There’s no teasing or taunting, it’s an honest immersion in each other’s pleasure.

He’s inside me slowly, slower than I would have thought. Maybe it’s the decades-long pause, maybe he thinks he’s already hurt me enough and never wants to do it again in any shape or form. But my body finds a way to accommodate him, _make yourself at home here Oliver_, _stay as long as you like, _and when he comes in me, he once more, without me asking, calls me by his name.

After, he wants to hold me but my skin crawls with giddiness and I can’t contain myself, so I suggest we go for a swim. He recalls another morning like this and wants to make sure this isn’t the same. I kiss my denial on his mouth and remind him that even then, I hadn’t been able to stay away for more than half a day.

He takes my hand and holds it when we go quietly down the stairs, out the door and all the way down to the shore until we get into the water, and we never swim at more than an arm’s length of each other.

In the afternoon, we sit in the salon. Manfredi has taken Mafalda for a doctor’s appointment and my mother is having a better day so her caretaker has taken her for a walk and with a promise of ice cream, coaxed Little Ollie to join them. We are alone at the house, and Oliver reclines on the faded pistachio-colored armchair as I sit at the piano, not really practicing but rather entertaining him. I have asked him for requests but he has said he has too many, and that he will let me choose instead.

“You didn’t listen to my requests back then either,” he smiles, fond.

“That was because I wanted to impress you. And keep you there longer. If I had played what you wanted right away, you would have been gone soon after.”

“I assumed you just thought you knew better than me what I wanted.” He looks at a painting on the wall next to him, an old one that my mother has inherited and that has been hanging in the same place since I was born. “Maybe you did.”

I watch him as he sits there without a single thought for what time of the day or day of the week it is, and I ask when he needs to be in Menton. He has said, now several times, that he isn’t leaving, but I assume that the people there must be expecting him soon nevertheless.

He looks sheepish, scrapes at an invisible scratch on the armrest of the chair. “Forget Menton. There’s no Menton.”

“I don’t understand.”

He gathers himself, ponders how far back he should rewind his story. “The night I decided all this, I thought I would just buy a ticket to Nice and simply call to ask you to pick me up.”

He explains that by the time the morning had come, it had turned out to be a case of the drunken man’s confidence. Without the prosecco in his veins, things weren’t so simple, and it took a while, with Micol, with the boys, everything. By the time he was really ready to return, he had settled on writing to me instead.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing you on the phone, polite on the surface, but between the lines, reluctant to receive me.”

I would never be reluctant to receive him, but that is not the only part of what he said that has me confused.

“You never said Nice when you wrote. You said you were going to be…what was it? Yes, _on your way from Rome to Menton soon and would be happy to stop by for a night if it was alright with us_.”

He smiles at my word-for-word memorization of his message and explains that yes, he had gone to Rome first: he had had an interview at the university.

“It seemed like the perfect plan. I could go and talk with them and pretend that I wasn’t in Italy just for you.”

“Why would you have needed to pretend?”

The uncertainty from last night returns and his eyes inspect the cracks in the flaxen ceiling. “If you were with someone. Didn’t want to see my face. I would have been gone the next morning.”

I look at his profile, his eyes, nose, hairline. I leave the piano to perch on the armrest of his chair and reach over to stroke his chin with my thumb. When would I not want to see this face? This was the only face I wanted to see when I went to bed, woke up, got home from a tour, after a performance. Then it occurs to me.

“What did they say at the Sapienza?”

He watches me closely. “They are offering me a position.”

The goosebumps start from my forearms and spread upwards. I have silently wondered what he had meant when he said he belonged here, belonged with me. How could that be, when he had written to me from the States and I had settled in Italy?

“Did you take it?” I ask, voice decidedly steady but it doesn’t fool him. Nothing ever does.

He looks amused. “Should I? What do you think?”

“What do I think?” I wonder if there’s a catch. There must be.

“Yes.”

“I think you should take it.”

“You think I should take it,” he repeats.

He reaches to take my hand and brings it to his lips. “For years I’ve had this dream, more like a fantasy, where I live in a city, not New York, a European city, maybe somewhere in Italy, maybe Paris, and you’re there. On Sundays we walk along a river—there’s always a river—and I hold your hand.”

Then, carefully: “I know you have this house here, your mother, Little Ollie. But would you ever consider–“

“Yes.”

My reply is instant, so immediate that he won’t have to think that I wouldn’t know how to respond or would only be saying yes because I would’ve concluded that that would please him.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I say again and wrap my arms around his neck and press my cheek against his.

By the time the others return from their walk, we’ve moved onto the couch, Oliver’s arm around me and my head on his shoulder. My mother stops at the door with a smile lighting up her features.

“Oliver. When did you get here?”

He gets up and kisses her cheek, tells her he’s happy to be here. We tell her the news about Rome, to give her time to adjust, even though her caretaker and I exchange a look, knowing we’ll have to tell her again tomorrow and the day after that.

“But isn’t that wonderful!”

Her reaction leaves no room for doubt and she comes and kisses me, too, then asking something that makes my throat constrict: “Have you told your father yet?”

I’ve gotten good at going along with her meandering thoughts, but she never mentions my father and I’m now at a loss of words.

Oliver needs to come and save me.

“Yes, we did, Annella. He said it was wonderful, too.”

“But of course he did! He always says that he hopes that one day–“

She is interrupted by Little Ollie barging in, his shirt smudged in chocolate ice cream. He begs Oliver to come and play with him in the backyard, and my mother loses her train of thought and never returns to it, but there’s a sense of my father’s blessing in the air. Not that we would’ve doubted nor needed it, and I never suspected that he would mind if his role as my vigil walk companion was taken over by the tall American who arrived one summer and became family without any of us noticing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. More to follow.


	4. Poseidonian Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Did we waste an opportunity, or was it better not to rip those wounds open then?”_

”The worst one was in the same year when the boys and I had been here, visiting your parents in the summer.”

His eyes close momentarily, as if that would make the sting of the memory stay put at a respectable distance. When he turns to me, the moon glow lighting him from behind, the wince is gone and his eyes are tender again. “Are you sure you want to hear these?”

I nod, keep nodding.

We are on the balcony watching the day descend as we have started to do every evening since he came back. The house all quiet inside, he finally keeps his promise of telling me about what he later learns to call his Poseidonian days, the days in mid-November on which I would either celebrate or commiserate getting another year older. On the same day every year, unbeknownst to me, he had held vigil for what we had once been and still were, even if it only manifested in his thoughts and mine, continents apart.

“That summer it had become clear that I couldn’t get any of it back without you here. I was surrounded by your parents, the kids, everyone, but I was still alone.”

I press a short kiss on his cheek, to comfort the Oliver of the past.

He leans into it, grateful, and continues: “The house, the shore, the town were fine, but all irrelevant to my happiness.”

“Which lay elsewhere,” I smile, smug.

We will perform this play many times in the upcoming years, and I will ask him to tell me the stories again and again, especially those that become my favorites, just to hear how once a year, once in every missing year, he had been all mine, even if I had not known it. But right now, when he has just returned to me, everything is still new.

“Which lay elsewhere,” he confirms smiling back at me and leans in to kiss behind my ear.

The cool of the balustrade pressing against my back, I encourage him to go on with the story.

“So that year I almost called you on your birthday, but I thought you might be out with your friends.” However, by the morning, his urge had been lulled back to the routine numbness and he was relieved not to have made the call.

“Which year was it again?” I ask and he tells me. I shake my head. “I didn’t go anywhere that day, I had an exam to study for. I would have been home, had you called. I wish you had called.”

I shudder, not from the story but because even though the night has now settled, the puffs of the last winds of the day have not. Noticing that I’m cold, Oliver unlinks my arms from the slots of railing and pulls them to his chest. I burrow my face into his shirt.

“And then what?” he asks.

“I would have answered.”

“And then?”

“You would have told me whatever it was that you wanted to tell me.”

“I had no idea what I would have told you.”

“That you missed me, then. And I would have told you that I missed you, too.”

“Very risky.”

“Because we were only fifty miles apart?”

“Yes.”

“How quickly could you have driven there?”

“Not fast enough.”

“Do you think it would have happened, then and there?”

“I don’t know. It might have been up to you.”

I bark a sarcastic laugh. “Of course it would have happened if it had been up to me only.”

He understands my gentle ribbing of myself but clarifies regardless. “I didn’t know it then.”

“Besides, I lived alone that semester. We would have had privacy.”

“What things would we have needed privacy for?” He’s teasing me now.

“You know what things.”

“You mean how we would have had a civilized drink together on your compact couch and talked about my job and your studies. And when the twilight came, I would have made efforts to leave, only to turn around at the door and briskly return to embrace you.”

He holds me as he speaks, his hand sliding down my body until it cups around one of my buttocks.

“And I would have burrowed into you like this,” I say.

“Would we have had time to move into your bedroom or would I have undressed you on the spot?” he asks, his lips on my hairline.

“It was a studio apartment. No need to move anywhere.”

“Perfect.”

He kisses my temple, grazes the top of my ear. I turn my face and lift it up to be kissed.

“But would you have gone back home after that, like nothing had been disrupted?” I say when the kisses stop.

Oliver is quiet. At that time, he had not yet given up hope that he and Micol could have eventually, after enough tries, found something that would have brought them together. So yes, most likely he would have gotten into his car later that night, because morning would not have been an option, and driven home to his wife.

“Did we waste an opportunity, or was it better not to rip those wounds open then? Would you have returned now, if we had muddled everything that night?”

I feel his shrug rather than see it.

“I don’t know. I might have returned sooner, or later, or now, but I was always going to come back.” He swallows. “I think I knew it after you visited me. And refused to come for dinner.”

His finger pokes me in my lower back, chiding.

He isn’t mad but I twitch nevertheless. “I just couldn’t. I hope you weren’t disappointed.”

“I was. Of course I was, are you kidding me?” Then the poke becomes a caress. “But I don’t blame you. I don’t think I would have been able to, either, if I were you.”

“I didn’t want to see a version of your life where I was left to play the role of the intruder and nothing more.”

Oliver sweeps his thumb along my cheekbone, gently like one would dry a child’s tears from his cheek even though there aren’t any on mine.

He pulls me to sit with him on the wicker sofa tucked in the corner of the balcony and spreads an old quilt over us to keep us warmer.

“I’m glad you came to the university, though.”

“And the bar? At the hotel?”

“That too. I knew then that it wasn’t over for you either. Even if you seemed to be faring better than I was.”

“Better? Did you not see how badly I still wanted you?”

“I tried not to. I wouldn’t have needed much to throw it all away right then and there, my job, Micol, the house, everything.”

“Did you ever dread those days?” I ask, leaning my cheek against the angle of Oliver’s shoulder, trying to get more comfortable on the old rickety sofa and wanting to hear more stories of his vigils.

“Sometimes. Because I knew it would leave me missing you even worse. One year, I couldn’t find the postcard I took from you. Remember that?”

How could I not remember?

_“Cor cordium,” _I whisper.

“Yes, that one,” he says fondly. “One year, it was missing from the wall of my office that particular morning. I spent half a day looking for it, until someone finally told me that the cleaning lady had broken it the day before and thought she could get the glass replaced before I would notice.”

He says that people had asked why the postcard was so important that it had warranted hours spent looking and asking around. He had felt profoundly alone when he had realized that he couldn’t explain, simply because no one knew anything about me or us.

“It was a miserable day that year. But most times I looked forward to it because it meant I could spend time with you.”

“You should have told me. I would have done the same. But I guess I did spend time with you on my walks in Rome.” I think for a moment, and add, remembering how even after a long time, his face or voice would come to me at the odd book reading or on an ordinary Thursday night: “And maybe everywhere.”

“And now I’m with you here.” The weaves of the sofa squeak as he shuffles and turns to me, lays his hand on my thigh, fingers splayed.

“You are.”

“In flesh and blood.”

“Much, much flesh.” I turn to him, too, and slip my hand underneath his shirt from the bottom, grazing his skin upwards so lightly that the touch makes him shiver. I press my palm against his chest, my hand disappearing under the clothing up to my elbow.

“I want to climb to your lap like in the old days.”

_Then do_, his eyes urge and I push him back against the sofa and arrange myself on his lap, straddling his thighs, kissing his neck, because it has always been one of my favorite things but knowing how he had missed it, has made the gesture even more dear to me.

“I thought about you like this sometimes,” he confesses. “You in your shorts, in my lap, demanding my attention.”

“I do like your attention,” I tell the curve of his earlobe.

One shift of my hips and his voice becomes ragged. “I can feel that.”

My mind wanders back to the night when I had refused the invitation to his house: “Did you consider staying at the hotel with me?”

“Did you consider asking me?”

“I almost did.”

“So many almosts.”

“Your car could have broken down and it would have been too late in the evening to find an auto shop.”

“Did I have a car?”

“I think you did.”

“In that case, yes, you’re right, the only reasonable option would have been to get a room at the hotel.”

“A room of your own?”

“Of course. But on the same floor, maybe at the end of the hallway.”

“And then you would have come into mine at midnight.”

“Would you have lain awake, waiting for the knock on the door?”

I nod. “I would have waited till morning if I had to.”

“I never would have lasted till morning if we had only been a few doors apart.”

“I would have waited for you naked so that you wouldn’t have had time to change your mind when you came.”

I feel his body’s response to the thought of me, lying on a hotel bed, unclothed, ready to be taken by him and him alone, like not a day would have passed since our last time.

I kiss him on the lips, as inelegant and hungry as at seventeen and Oliver suggests we move inside because he wants to take off my clothes.

“Right now.”

We slip under the covers and Oliver mutters between the buttons and zippers that among all the numerous things we had missed about each other, he had missed this act of uncovering me.

When he has me naked, I tell him to wait a little, for I like being just me against him, him still fully clothed while I have nothing to hide. I hold him tightly and he kisses my hair and my shoulder and when I pull away, he’s out of his own clothes in record time.

The moment of my showing I have no secrets is my gift to him and my personal reminder of my surrendering to this person whom I know to be worth it, but in everything that follows we are equal. Where he kisses me, I touch him with the tenderest graze; where my lips press on him, he caresses with his eyes, limbs, and his whole being.

But it’s not only gentle and his grip is firm when he puts his hand on me and says: “I barely slept after leaving the Harbor Inn that night.”

“The Harbor Inn?”

“The hotel you stayed at in New Hampshire.”

“That’s what it was called?” My voice catches after a particularly pleasurable stroke of his hand. “I– I had forgotten its name.”

“After leaving, I thought of you all night. You sleeping in your Harbor Inn bed. Having breakfast in their dining room, reading their morning papers at a table overlooking the water.”

He keeps surprising me by how much I have been in his mind when I thought I had barely registered between his job, students, wife, children, dinners, yard work, conferences, holidays.

“But that’s not all I thought about.”

His hand moves on from my cock and further between my legs and I need to swallow.

“Tell me,” I croak as his slick finger starts to make its way inside me.

“Micol and the boys had gone to bed but I stayed behind in the living room, alone, because I couldn’t go to the bedroom with the air of you all over me. I took a shower but it didn’t go away.”

_You can’t wash memories away with water,_ I want to say. I had tried it.

“Ostensibly, I was reading, but I didn’t even open the book. I knew you must have been getting ready for bed at the hotel around that time. I wondered if you thought of me, like I did of you.”

I nod.

“You did?”

I nod again, not able to do more because his finger is now curving inside me.

“Good.”

The pleasure in his voice thrills me. He keeps telling me how he had thought of me in bed, what I might do to myself, where my hands would go, and how much he would have wanted to be there doing those things to me, instead.

His words caress and arouse me as much as his finger does and all this thought of Oliver in his dark living room, hair slicked back and skin still damp after his shower, touching himself in secret while thinking of me, tightens me and–

“Oliver, I–”

He must have recognized the signs even without me telling him, because he doesn’t seem surprised, only pleased, when I come all over myself.

Later that night, after he has let me return the favor and we’ve closed the window and tucked the covers over us, he must think I’m already asleep and I almost am, so much so that in the morning I’m not sure if I dreamed it after all. But at night, it sounds like he tells me very quietly that he no longer feels thoroughly alone, and the last thing I feel before I drift off are his lips on my neck, just placed there, not even kissing, and his arm tightening its hold on me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and all the lovely comments you have been leaving, they mean the world to me <3 
> 
> More to follow after the holidays but still before the end of the year!


	5. Ithaka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _This late in the summer, the grass on Monet’s berm is already starting to yellow._

A couple of weeks later, we are in bed and his hand is lightly caressing the bottom of my spine when he says: “I’ve changed my mind.”

He says it softly, fit for this early Sunday morning, but out of reflex, my muscles tense up with dread at those words and so he must quickly conclude, to shoo away my worry and to show he didn’t mean any harm: “Forget the slot between your forefinger and thumb. This is my new favorite spot on you, this.”

I relax again, grin, and lift my head from my pillow to take a peek at him at the foot of the bed.

After the first night’s hesitation of how to be together, we have bordered on overcompensation.

We’ve built a bridge across time from the pleasures in the hotel room in Rome to this bedroom in B. and walked over that bridge back and forth every chance we’ve gotten. We have met all the treasured places on each other again and found new ones, and he now thumbs the very dip of my lower back, rests his head there and presses his ear against my spine. Licks the groove and I hold my breath and still, not knowing whether he will go north or south. He enjoys the moment, the tip of his tongue touching my skin but not giving me a hint of one way or the other, but then we are interrupted by a knock on the door and Miranda’s words asking if we are up already.

“Almost. We’ll be down soon.”

I raise my voice enough for it to carry through the closed door—she has learned not to come in unannounced—and roll away from under Oliver. He groans, but we both know it’s only a matter of time before Little Ollie’s knock will follow if one of us doesn’t show up to watch the cartoons with him.

Uninterrupted mornings had always been elusive for us. Always on the lookout for sounds of someone in the hallway or for steps approaching, we have never had one, not really, not since those three glorious days in Rome two decades ago.

Miranda must have read my mind, because she suggests at breakfast that maybe Oliver and I would like to take a trip before we start to make the arrangements for the move to Rome.

“It will still be a while before the Sapienza wants him, right?”

She calls it a honeymoon, and something melts in me when Oliver doesn’t contest her idea nor the terminology.

“But where would we go,” I ask when Oliver and I later lay in the grass in the backyard, sun in our eyes, forcing our eyelids shut.

Our suggestions fly—a visit to the Cavafy museum in Alexandria or to see the Farnese Atlas in Naples, a climb on the slopes of Mount Parnassos to Delphi—and we find worthy arguments for all of them, until Oliver sits up abruptly.

“I had a colleague who went on a Mediterranean tour. On a cruise. We can do all of them.” His eyes light up. “We can do everything.”

“We can do everything,” I repeat slowly.

He laughs. “How are you able to make everything sound salacious?”

“I can stop.”

“Don’t stop.”

He turns to kiss me, in the middle of the garden in broad daylight, which twenty years ago I wouldn’t have even dared to dream about. No, my dreams had been about the two of us alone, sharing our secret in silence, hidden from everyone else.

What a journey, from those days to this.

Cavafy writes in his Ithaka about the beauty of the journey, not of the goal. _Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you’re destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. _The first time, Oliver got here by a finger-snap of the universe that wanted to entertain itself by playing with two unsuspecting fools, but this time his journey was deliberate, unhurried.

As is now his mouth on mine.

The first of the kisses is perfectly decent, but by the fourth one he leans in to whisper in my ear like a schoolboy: “I want to do things to you that would shock poor Mafalda for life. Is there anywhere we can go?”

I start to suggest upstairs, but it’s too risky in the middle of the day. Not only Mafalda but Little Ollie could wander in at any time.

I get an idea.

“Come,” I tell him and help him up.

This late in the summer, the grass on Monet’s berm is already starting to yellow.

The place too full of acute memories, I hadn’t dared to take him here on the tour we did on his first day back, but now it feels perfect for our need to get away from the prying eyes at the house.

“So, three weeks out on the sea, what do you say?” he asks when we have settled in, the grass enveloping our twenty-years-older bodies.

I shuffle to lean on my forearm, looking at him. “Will you be able to handle being stuck on a boat with me for three weeks, with nowhere to run?”

“I plan to be stuck with you for the rest of my life.”

I roll over to lie on my back again and close my eyes. “Good.”

Since he returned, we have preferred to focus on the present and not the past; at best, looking back at joint memories. However, notions from our years apart inevitably trickle into our conversations and there’s no denying that other people have happened to us.

One’s first love settles into a perspective only when it’s mirrored by other experiences. Whereas for others, such closer study could find a later infatuation eclipses the old one, for me, it only sharpened the original image. It’s easy to say it in hindsight and it’s a terrible cliché, but in many ways and some of them unexpected, I wouldn’t be here without the lenses of other relationships.

As we lie amidst the tall, unkept grass, I tell Oliver what had prompted me to tell him in that hotel bar that he was the one I wanted to be my very last connection to this world. The reason had been my conversation with Michel, who wanted me to be the one to close his eyes at the time of his death, even while knowing that we wouldn’t be, to borrow from Oliver, stuck with each other for the rest of our lives.

“How morbid,” says Oliver on this blindingly bright afternoon surrounded by faded mimosas and adds that for us, that will be in the very, very, very distant future.

I have thought about this more than he has. “Or maybe I drift from this world before my body does, like what has happened to my mother.”

Her consciousness is with the rest of us only momentarily; most of the time she is in her girlhood, often thinking I am her father, scolding her for her teenage antics.

“Then again, if I get to spend my final times forever stuck in that boyhood summer, waiting for you on the balcony, kissing you between the chamomile-scented sheets, it won’t be so bad.”

“Please don’t make light of it,” Oliver begs, as the brutality of her disease hasn’t had time to numb him to it yet.

“I have to. Sometimes. Otherwise it crushes one’s soul.”

He understands, or tries to.

I reach over to stroke his arm. “It is a certain kind of blessing, getting to relive the happy times. Like the first time I kissed you.”

“You mean the first time I kissed you.”

“I was the one who did it.”

“I was the one who set it up. Forget all your boldness, you wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

He may be right, but we rib each other playfully about it a little while longer, the mood now much lighter.

“Seven thousand and three hundred days,” he then says.

“A lifetime ago,” I confirm. Someone could have been born, grown up, and fathered his own child in that time.

He shakes his head. “Like yesterday.”

“What do you remember about that day? Tell me.” I close my eyes again.

“The restraint. You, making it impossible. I cursed and thanked the translator for messing up my pages and giving me the afternoon with you. You being so bold after you told me and realized I wasn’t telling you no. You knew I was stalling only.”

“I didn’t,” I interrupt him. “I may have been bold but only because I knew I had nothing left to lose. You already knew my worst secret.”

“Which wasn’t a secret at all. Not to me. Not since the day you had blushed. I just didn’t know if you’d ever tell me. I hoped that you would and prayed that you wouldn’t.”

“I had to.”

“I know. But I chastised myself for a long time for kissing you that day. I shouldn’t have given in.”

“It was only a kiss.”

“No, it wasn’t. I knew in my mind what I would have wanted to do. Hence the regret. My mind had done all those other things, too.”

“What other things?”

“This.” His sun-warmed hand slips under the hem of my shirt, lands on my skin. “I had watched you for so many days, sitting, walking, jogging, swimming, skin everywhere but I had no permission to touch. All I wanted was to put my hand on your skin, feel it, feel the goosebumps I knew you would get.”

He flattens his palm over my stomach, moves it lower, past my navel.

“That was all you wanted?”

“I was kidding myself, of course. I wouldn’t have stopped there. I would have wanted to feel every curve, every hard bone, every soft give. I would have wanted to touch you everywhere, find out where you liked it the most.”

He’s seducing me with his words and I expect him to move his hand again as he speaks, but he doesn’t. It stays put, fingers circling close to everything but not quite there. My stomach coils in anticipation under his touch, but I love it when he taunts me. It used to be a way to be certain I had his attention, even if it was only for that moment when he threw me the jab.

He lifts up my shirt, high enough to put his mouth on my chest.

“This is what you wanted to do?” I ask, my voice breaking when his warm tongue moves over my nipple.

“This too.”

He brings his face close to mine and we share a breath while I can feel, rather than see, him unbutton the three buttons of my shorts.

“I wanted to kiss you here,” his open mouth is now on mine and his tongue pushes freely inside, “–and also here.”

He has parted the opening of my shorts enough to put his hand inside and my underwear hides nothing. He pushes them down and envelops my cock within his fingers.

He leaves my face and kneels beside my hips, head bowing down to kiss the warm crease where the hair curls, and he keeps going, kisses a path on my entire length before wrapping his lips around the crown and letting his mouth do now everything that I would have loved for it to have done the first time we were here, until my body blissfully unfurls for him on the sunlit berm.

After, he rests his head on my shoulder, the only sounds coming from the occasional shuffle of the wind in the tall grass.

“Would you drink from Lethe?” I ask, spent and steeped in happiness. The river of forgetfulness, the river whose waters Plato said provided a new beginning by wiping off all one’s memories of a past life at rebirth.

“And forget everything?”

“Forget everything that came after that day. Clean slate, start again. No one else, ever, just us.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Me neither.”

_Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich, _wrote Cavafy of the journey.

We gave away twenty years, but there could be worse things. Our paths could have overlapped, then run in parallel and eventually diverged, never to meet again. In our version, they meandered, mine perhaps more than his, reaching hilltops and rocky passes until they converged again in this blooming valley flush with flaming marigolds amidst the yellowed grass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted the first chapter for Elio's birthday, so it's only fitting that there's an update on Timmy's as well <3
> 
> The quotes are from the poem [Ithaka](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec) by C. P. Cavafy, as translated by Edmund Keeley.


	6. In Sickness and in Health

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You’ll be there, when I’m old, and sick with maybe more than just shrimp?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elio is seasick/has food poisoning in this chapter. There are a few, non-graphic mentions of throwing up here and there, but the very last paragraph is a flash-forward into the future and should be completely safe to read.

We embark on our Mediterranean tour from Haifa, late on a late September evening. When the ship departs, we are on deck, watching the other passengers wave at the well-wishers on land, and then go inside to have a late dinner at our designated table in the ship’s grand dining room.

Giddy with our freedom, we stay up late, indulge at dinner and laugh in the hallways when we finally retreat to our cabin. Oliver twirls me around in the 180 square feet that will be our home for the next three weeks until I’m dizzy and then pulls me with him to watch the views.

I press my forehead against the cool glass and after the traffic of people at the villa, we luxuriate in the moment of just us above the undulating black ink of the Mediterranean. The lights of the city long behind us, the sea illuminated only by the moon, Oliver’s arms snake around my waist from behind, and I ease into him but when his palm starts to gently rub my stomach, it doesn’t feel as relaxing as it normally does.

“I must have eaten one too many shrimp,” I suggest, and he tells me it’s good that I learned that lesson on the first night of the all-inclusive cruise.

We take our clothes off and discover that if we leave the curtains open and both lay our heads on my pillow, we can still see the moon from our bed.

“_Let me come with you. What a moon there is tonight!” _Oliver starts to recite a Greek poem_. “The moon is kind—it won’t show that my hair turned white.”_

I turn to stroke his hair as I finish the verse for him_. “The moon will turn my hair to gold again.”_

We wait but my queasy feeling doesn’t subside, so we decide that there will be plenty of nights left ahead of us before we eventually dock in Venice, and we go to sleep without trying to incite anything in each other.

No more than two hours later in the night I stir, as do my insides. I rush to the still slick-clean bathroom in the dark, and the first bout of my dinner has just come up and forced its way out of me when Oliver appears behind me, worried, and turns on the light.

Our first night and day on the ship are spent in the cramped bathroom of our cabin. We curse every crustacean that ever existed and Oliver sits with me on the tiled floor, reads to me when he isn’t busy wiping the sweat off of my forehead or rubbing my back.

During the moments when the queasiness releases its hold on me enough to let me have coherent thoughts, I tell him to go and enjoy what the ship or the current port has to offer, but he refuses to leave me.

“This is a horrible waste of your time,” I try to persuade him.

“_Not to me. Not if it’s you_,” he quotes Pylades, and I realize he is the first one to look after me like this since my mother, who would sit with me when I had the flu and change the fevered sheets soaked with my sweat.

I have prided myself on my self-sufficiency, and only a few times I would have welcomed the help, but I either had no one around at those times or didn’t want to ask. The one time I fell ill during my and Michel’s time together, he insisted he would only be in the way and didn’t want to burden me when I wasn’t feeling well to begin with.

When I had laid the receiver of the phone back in its place after that call, alone in my apartment with the angry sounds of the Parisian cats fighting in the back alley, I hadn’t been able to stop my thoughts from flying to Oliver who had sought me out, concerned, when I had had so much as a nose bleed. Or held my head when I was throwing up on the nightly streets of Rome.

Those were the less than noble secrets that my body has long held from everyone but him, and the ill-fated shrimp are now forcing it to show them all to him again, as I lie curled on the cool tiles, eyes closed, my head propped against Oliver’s thigh and waiting for the torment to subside.

When I feel well enough to move back to the bed in early evening, Oliver goes down to the ship’s kitchen. Before leaving, he closes the curtains to keep me from seeing the waves and the tilt of the horizon lest they make me fall worse again, and when he returns, he has clear soup and bread with him, courtesy of the ship’s cook and my Oliver’s charms.

Weak and hungry from not having eaten all day, I overdo it with the food and pay for it in the bathroom again later that night, but that is the last time. After we return to the bed and Oliver kisses me goodnight without a moment’s regard to what has transpired in my mouth mere minutes ago, I mumble that I hope he won’t contract whatever it is that has ailed me, but also that I have never loved him more.

As the sickness passes, gratitude spreads in my limbs and I can’t bear to part with my savior, so Oliver lets me sleep sprawled on top of him, all my weight on him, and I don’t wake once the entire night.

The next day, I feel better and we dare to leave the ship and go on an excursion. The ship has docked in Naples for the day, and many others spring for ice cream or shopping, but Oliver and I spend the day among Greek and Roman antiquities in the National Archaeological Museum.

Our main interest, the Farnese Atlas is on the ground floor of the museum, but Oliver wants to build our appetite, so he leads me first to the second floor, to the Pompeii section.

The tourist season is quieting down, so we are accompanied by only a handful of other patrons which suits us well. Now that the food poisoning that had thwarted our plans for the first days was out of the way, my stomach has started to coil in a different way, and if I could have my way, I would have Oliver at my fingertips at all times. At least the slow day at the museum allows me the chance to fiddle with the hem of his shirt, to nonchalantly press against his arm, to rest my hand on his shoulder while he looks at the artifacts discovered and dug up from the ashy ruins of Pompeii.

In the Farnese Hall we stare at the statue that has survived over 1800 years, and as so often, I’m overcome with the passing of time and how, despite the constant destruction and reconstruction of our world, some things seem eternal.

I point at the weight of the globe on the statue’s shoulders. “The sky that Atlas carries contains the oldest known depiction of Western constellations.”

“Imagine having this in your home, just casually walking by it every now and then,” Oliver muses, looking up at the seven-feet tall statue on its pedestal.

“The Farnese family did, when these belonged to them for a few centuries.”

The marble Atlas, Hercules, and other objects in the Farnese collection had only ended up in the museum in the 18thcentury, presumably at the wish of King Ferdinand IV.

“But he knew little about the arts and cared even less, so most likely all this–,“ I wave around the hall populated with antiquities, “–was the work of his queen Maria Carolina. Who supported the arts and, by the way, was Marie Antoinette’s sister.”

Oliver shakes his head and sits down on a bench, leaning the back of his head against the wall. “I continue to be impressed by how you know so many things.”

I sit down next to him, wondering if I could kiss him but then a small group enters to admire the Atlas with us, so I only bump my forehead on his shoulder briefly. “I read up on the Farnese collection.”

He is wearing shorts that come down to mid-thigh and no one cares to look when I slip my hand behind his knee, clandestine but bold, finding the smooth, hairless spot that I know exists there.

He shuffles in his seat but I don’t move my hand and carry on with our conversation while keeping my little secret, inconspicuous to the museum-goers on the other side of the room.

I tell Oliver that the king himself—nicknamed _Re Lazzarone_, the king of the outcasts—was vulgar and more interested in the more idle pleasures of life, spending his time with the everymen at the port. He had been encouraged in doing so, because keeping the young king ignorant and uneducated served the interests of people running the government.

His eyes travel over my face as he listens to me speak. I have his full attention, but I find myself aching for more, hoping we were alone. These little touches over the afternoon, like my fingertip caressing that smooth patch behind his knee that always stays white because of an old scar, have only served to whet my appetite and I can’t wait for the chance to let them burst into full bloom when we get back to the ship.

Oliver is thinking along the same lines, because he suggests we skip the dinner on the ship and stay in, but I try to be sensible and say that we should go.

“We need to eat. I want something else than clear soup for a change. And we’ve paid for it, after all,” I say and hug him to persuade him.

He groans in my ear, stops me from pulling away even though I need to change my clothes for dinner.

I add a whisper, kissing his neck: “We’ll have plenty of time after.”

“Your kissing me like that is not helping.”

I laugh. “Come on, we’ll miss the dinner soon if you don’t let me go. I still have to change, I can’t show up in that fancy dining room in these shorts.”

“I can help you get them off,” he offers and we almost do miss the dinner.

The other passengers at our table, a balding, neatly dressed Italian gentleman and his wife that we had already met on our first evening, had noticed us missing at dinner the previous night and with a wink, they imply that they had not been surprised.

“We expected you newlyweds to have better things to do than to dine with the elderly,” the wife says as she leans in and smiles.

Oliver and I look at each other and notice that we both relish the idea of being newly betrothed to each other, so we decide not to correct her. Miranda had called this our honeymoon and maybe it could be, in a way.

They ask what we do for a living.

“Elio is a classical pianist,” Oliver says and touches my back, proud. “And I will start teaching at the Sapienza when the semester starts. And you?”

It turns out that the man is a professor; he’s on retirement now, but he has had a tenure at the Sapienza, at same department where Oliver will be. It creates an immediate sense of camaraderie between them and thus, the professor scoots closer.

“You know what, I like you and I’m going to tell you everything you need to know.”

Oliver receives an oral history of the past four decades of the department, including a list of things to use to sway the department head if funding is up for grabs, and, delivered with a hush, a shortlist of names to avoid if possible.

Over the meal, they continue to compare the department politics between Rome and the States and the professor asks Oliver about his books. After we have finished dessert, they have just progressed to his third book. The scene reminds me of Oliver and my father’s endless discussions and I know how he’s missed them, so I don’t have the heart to tear him away just yet.

“I’m going to go and make today’s call,” I tell Oliver and touch his arm. “But I’ll come back.”

He nods, squeezes my arm. He knows that when we left B., I promised Mafalda to call to the house every evening, and so I leave Oliver at the table and go to our room to dial home.

“Everything is fine here,” Mafalda says as she picks up at the other end of the line.

“And you?” When she says everything is fine, she means my mother and Little Ollie, and I always have to ask about her separately. She is not getting any younger and the doctor’s appointments have gotten more frequent lately.

“I am doing great. I have been doing more in the backyard with Manfredi, too. It helps.”

“Is that what the doctor said?”

She changes the subject, not wanting to appear old or incompetent, but we will soon have to think about finding more help with the house, someone to come and ease her workload.

“How is the ship? Are you having fun? You aren’t sick anymore, are you?”

“Yes, it’s been great. And no, not sick anymore.”

“And Oliver, he’s enjoying himself?”

I smile, holding the phone receiver. She always asks. “Yes, him too.”

When I return to the dining room, Oliver and the professor are still deep in conversation, and I stop at the bar to watch them from afar. They have procured after-dinner drinks that they nurse in their hands and the professor’s wife looks on, fondly, probably accustomed to her husband getting carried away, even with strangers, whenever his discipline came up.

I notice some of the old yearning returning when I see Oliver with other people. There’s a new facet to it now that he is, underneath it all, truly mine, but watching him now at the table with half-strangers still makes me want to send him a silent wish: _Leave them Oliver, leave them and come to my bed, take care of me and let me take care of you until the sun comes up and this ship calls at a new port again_.

I decide to order a drink for myself, too, to pass the time.

The bartender with shiny, slicked-back hair looks me in the eye while he fixes it. Tentatively nodding at Oliver’s direction, he comments: “Your brother?”

“No,” I deny, even if he is, in a lot of ways, and I can’t help a smile.

“Lucky guy,” he comments and I’m not sure which one of us he means.

I take my drink to the table, and the pocket that my longing had carved into me fills up instantly when Oliver looks up, his features softening into a beaming smile when he sees me. He takes my hand and holds it in his lap for the next half hour as they finish their discussion and make plans to stay in touch once Oliver and I arrive in Rome. As I sip my tangy drink and watch Oliver in discussion, animated, eloquent, and assured, I become certain that the bartender had meant me.

Our earlier charade of playing newlyweds continues in bed that night as the ship glides on towards our next destination, Alexandria.

Oliver teases me, asking if the blushing groom is ready for his first time.

“If this is our first time, then how do you explain my knowing how much you like this?” I say and slip my hand under the covers in a well-placed, strategic move that makes him gasp.

“You’re clearly a natural,” he responds and takes my naked body in his arms, buries his face into my neck. Oliver has stopped shaving on the trip and I love the scratchy feeling on me even if it leaves me red and blotchy.

I think about our actual first time. “No, there was so much fumbling. I wasn’t sure you would ever want to see me again.”

“You goose,” he says most tenderly, palm kneading my buttock, and pauses to take a good look at me. “But are you sure you’re really well enough for this?”

“Are you afraid I’m going to be sick all over you?”

We both start laughing at the disgusting visual and have to interrupt everything we were doing. Limp from laughter, I kiss his face through my giggles.

When we get serious again, he states: “There could be worse things.”

If he thinks like me, then he would rather have me be sick all over him than anyone else licking him clean. I tell him that and ask if he thinks that’s sick, in itself, of me to say. He says that if it is, he hopes I never stop being so.

“Even when I’m old?”

“Especially when we’re old.”

I like how he changed my first-person singular to plural.

“You’ll be there, when I’m old, and sick with maybe more than just shrimp?”

“I will.”

“I will too.”

Decades later, many of my memories with him have been replaced by our new ones, but this one will stay with me, and I will think of his vow, our vow, when he’s recovering from a heart surgery and I have bribed the nurse to move the armchair in his hospital room next to his bed, because I’m too old and my joints won’t allow to move it myself, but I want to be able to reach and hold his hand when I settle in the chair for sleep. The nurse won’t be put out, and will rather act like I’m doing her a favor, letting her serve her favorite patient’s husband. Even if Oliver’s heart will need occasional fixing in the physical sense, he will retain his ability to charm anyone and everyone.

And he will wake up in the middle of the night, notice my hand in his and tug until I’m awake, and I will get to tell him the good news that the operation has gone well and that he’s not getting rid of me that easily.

The breathing tube will have made his voice hoarse, but he will half-croak, half-whisper: “Didn’t I tell you, I’m not leaving.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On their first evening on the ship, Oliver recites from the poem Moonlight Sonata by Yannis Ritsos, translated by Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley. The next day, he quotes the exchange between Pylades and Orestes (“I’ll take care of you.” / “This is rotten work.” / “Not to me. Not if it’s you.”) from Orestes by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson. 
> 
> Also, in the book they went to Alexandria first and to Naples after that, but for plot reasons, I changed their itinerary a bit.
> 
> *
> 
> The final chapter will take place in Rome and will be up in a couple of weeks.


	7. Rome

We move to Rome when Oliver starts at his new position at the university.

We promise Little Ollie that we’ll come back to B. often, and are thankful that he’s already taken a liking to our new Mafalda who will help around the house along with the old one now that we are gone. The young niece’s real name is Giulia, but she resembles her aunt in her youth so much that my mother insisted on calling them both Mafalda, and eventually it was easier that the rest of us did, too. The original Mafalda grumbled about the extra help at first, but quickly settled into the new routine when she realized it would allow her to spend more time with Little Ollie whom she dotes on.

Leaving is bittersweet, as it always is when one leaves a place saturated with love, but with a new Mafalda and a new child in the house, it feels like life goes on within those walls even if we aren’t there anymore.

The Sapienza has helped us rent a small apartment behind Basilica di Santa Prassede, and Oliver and I have spent a full day unpacking when he finds it in one of the boxes.

I didn’t get a chance to show it to him back at the house, or perhaps I was saving it, as the last memory of the old days, ready to be plucked from the mothballs when I needed a reminder. He calls for me from the tiny bedroom that the landlord has called cozy, and I know by the tone of his voice what he has come upon.

“You kept this?” He’s pleased.

“I kept it.”

He holds the light blue, billowy shirt up by its shoulder seams, estimates if it would still fit him.

“It would still fit you,” I say before he has time to ask.

“How do you know?”

“My arms remember.”

I wrap them around him to prove my point, and he wraps the shirt over my back.

“How about you?”

I fill a little more of the shirt than I used to, but it’s still hopelessly big on me.

“I want to see.”

I pull off the t-shirt I was wearing, already damp from the day’s work, and slip my hands into Billowy’s sleeves that Mafalda had ironed twenty years ago and which now carry creases from being stuffed in moving boxes and hauled across oceans and continents with me over the years.

Oliver stops me from buttoning it up. “No, let it be.”

He pulls me to him, smiles as he pushes his hand up my back under Billowy, the shirt scrunching up along with it, and watches me with unmistakable intent.

“But the boxes,” I try, laughing, but then the laughter is muted by his fingertip grazing down my spine.

“Let them be, too,” he says and adds one of the most beautiful things he’s ever said to me, planting each word on my neck. “We have the rest of our lives for that.”

Oliver clears the top of our mattress and we tear away the moving company’s protective plastic before he lowers me down onto it. We are both sticky with sweat from carrying the boxes up to the third floor, many of them stacked with books upon books, but he doesn’t mind and his scent has always only spurred me on. He pushes my shirt, his shirt, wide open, exposing my body to the cool air and him, and leans in to kiss behind my ear and hums against my skin when I lick along the dew of his collarbone.

Somewhere along the way my jeans go missing, as do all of Oliver’s clothes, and so in that tiny bedroom, surrounded by candlelight because in October the sun sets in Rome before six and we have not had time to unpack any of our lamps yet, Oliver makes love to me between the boxes that contain everything we own, with me wearing the shirt that one summer contained my entire life.

Up until then it had been among my most prized possessions, but I had never anticipated how happy I am to one day realize that after that night, Billowy has become just a shirt, hanging among the others in our closet. There will come a time when one of us throws it on on a regular Saturday morning, to make coffee in the kitchen with the coffeemaker that’s chipped by then, and we’ll be half-way done with our toasts and eggs until one of us notes:_ remember that shirt?_

And we will remember, because we always will, but I will also be grateful that there’s no longer a need for the shirt to play the stand-in, because I now have the real thing.

It takes a few more weeks of moving in and filling in documents and arranging our belongings before we find a Friday evening to take a walk along Via Santa Maria dell’ Anima.

Oliver still gets frequently lost in the city that refuses to mark its alleyways into maps, but has settled in well at his job, and I have already started to give lessons again. Despite the limited space, we have managed to fit in a piano so I can take the occasional student when I’m not preparing for a performance. The instrument was laboriously brought upstairs by beautiful, young Italians, who entertained us by taunting each other loudly over the heavy task.

One of them, the youngest, stayed behind to have us sign the delivery form. I watched the sheen of the sweat on his tanned upper arms, toned from carrying people’s furniture, and when he dug around in his pockets for a pen for me to use, I noticed Oliver watching him, us, through the open door from the balcony where he was smoking.

I signed where instructed and the man took the sheet and the pen from me and left with one final wide smile to me and a nod to Oliver.

When he was gone, Oliver put out his cigarette on the balcony. I didn’t have to do a thing to get him to come and crowd me against the nearest wall, and he’d already started without me.

I suspected it was partly jealousy, partly unexpectedly woken desire, because that’s what it was for me, and with his lips on the juncture of my neck I asked: “Would you have wanted him to join us?”

He stopped what he was doing and it was a genuine but surprised: “No.” He seemed pleased at his own conclusion when he pressed his thumb onto my bottom lip: “Everything, right here.”

I agreed.

The larger bedroom serves as Oliver’s study and will double as a guest room when his sons will visit for New Years, while we have settled in the smaller bedroom. We could only fit in a bed much narrower than what we had in B., but it’s all the same, for we sleep entangled with each other anyway. The lost years need to be reimbursed.

The only time we need more space is when we both read in bed, side by side, and even then, one of us often forgoes his book and the other reads his out loud. The memories of the days when all of it is still new will stay with me through the years, and my favorite times of the day are when I lay under the covers with him, head resting on his chest, falling and rising with his breath, him reading to me. Inevitably, it ends with my limbs getting restless and my hands wandering to places that make Oliver stumble and skip on his words and then the book is forgotten.

In the midst of all our new routines, I may have delayed the visit to our spot, to our wall, on purpose, for I have been afraid of what would happen if the place where I used to come to talk to him didn’t accept him back anymore. I have shown him around the city, shown him my streets and porticos, the alleys that cut through the palazzos, but avoided that particular street. I’m sure Oliver has noticed, but he hasn’t rushed me.

But today he is home early, the evening is mild, and the world feels different enough that we can gently lace our fingers together on our way there even if the day still remains, for a dozen minutes or so, on this side of darkness.

When I lived here ten years ago and used to visit the wall, the wall where Oliver once pressed me against the stone to kiss me and imprint my heart with a forever, I would have given anything to have him here with me, and not just his phantom. I’ve told Oliver that I’d like to mend the heart of that twenty-seven-year-old me, to show that his thoughts weren’t in vain, that his wishes were heard and his deepest secrets, once again, aren’t his alone anymore. To make the imprint come alive was the best gift I thought I could give the Elio who had lived ten summers without his Oliver.

But when we’ve crossed Piazza Navona and are approaching the particular stretch of Via Santa Maria dell’ Anima—after the cross-section but before the string of back-to-back restaurants—I realize, and become more and more certain, that I don’t want to recreate the past and instead, want to keep that memory intact so that I can still revisit it whenever I need to remember those two carefree young men. Because doesn’t even the sweetest dream cease to be one when it comes true?

We do stop at the spot, Oliver’s hand lightly brushing my back so that my body knows he’s here in flesh, but we don’t stay long.

“Why don’t we leave a new imprint a little further along the street,” he suggests, seeing how muddled my thoughts are. “We can then visit both places whenever we want, later.”

“I like that idea.”

We turn to a side street and keep walking until we find a window ledge of a bookstore that is already closed for the night. When the stream of passersby is sparse enough to allow us some privacy and the loud rattle of a vespa has faded into the distance, we sit down, perched on the ledge and he leans in, doesn’t hold me by my cheek, hand, or waist because he knows I’m not going anywhere, kisses me, and I smile when I kiss him back, and that’s how the ghosts of the young men a few palazzos east from that ledge make friends with the men we are today, and how Rome becomes not only the city where we once were free, but the place where we are now happy.

On our way home, we stop for drinks at the piazza. We huddle closer in our wool coats because now the night has fallen to blanket the eternal city, and we order something to keep our blood warm. As we sit outside, someone tries to sell us souvenirs with the words of Gogol inscribed on them: _You fall in love with Rome slowly, gradually, and then for life._

“That only applies to Rome,” he squeezes my knee after the girl has left with her merchandise. “It was never slow.”

“Since day one?” I ask, because I like hearing his answer.

He leans back in his chair. “Since day one.”

_Let the summer never end, let him never leave_, I once had, against all reason, begged from the universe. This summer has come to an end, leaves have packed up their green, and only the odd warm day peeks in between the crisp Sundays when we walk along the Tiber and Oliver takes my hand, and eventually these days, too, will give way to the cheek-pinching air of winter. There is no more summer, but it will revisit us next year, and the one after that, and the one after that. That hasn’t changed. Seasons will come and go as they have since the birth of time. But now, he will be here for all of them.

_Let him never leave_, I will whisper to him on most nights even years later, even though I have no fear anymore that he would, and when he kisses me back, we both know it’s a reminder of how we almost lost everything once and how lucky we are that we never did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s always a little bit wistful to post the last chapter of any story, but ever since last summer, this one in particular has been the most satisfying (and is it pretentious to say, healing? In terms of how I was left yearning after the sequel?) fic writing experience I’ve had thus far, so I’m a little teary-eyed to let go of this one now. But all is well for them, and in that sense I'm at peace with ending this one here and maybe returning to the characters of them in another story, another parallel universe, sometime later.
> 
> Thank you for having been here with me <3 It’s been a privilege to get to share this with you all.
> 
> (Whether you read this soon after posting or maybe find this much, much later on, I will always be interested in hearing from you and what you thought.)

**Author's Note:**

> I always love to hear what you think, and you can also find me on Tumblr at [angel-in-new-york-city](https://angel-in-new-york-city.tumblr.com)


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